Guatemala. - Rigoberta Menchu´s political movement is growing. Recent events of the committee pro party WINAQ in Quetzaltenango have resulted in gaining new members. WINAQ is using the internet to inform about their political progress on YOUTUBE.
The latest video is at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b80ydnzDI4I
For more information the movement can be contacted at:
Mail:
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Mail:
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On March 13, 2009, Rigoberta Menchu signed the legal registration of the provisional committee for the creation of the political party WINAQ. This was the second important step towards the formation of the political party.
The first step was taken on the 14th of October 2008, when Rigoberta Menchu announced the formation of the committee of political movement WINAQ, and presented the legal documents to start the party formation process establish by law before the Supreme Electoral Tribunal of Guatemala, Tribunal Supremo Electoral, TSE. With this procedure the legal path towards the establishment of her own political party was on its way.
Then the Register of Citizens passed the inscription to the Organization of Political Parties of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal of Guatemala, (Tribunal Supremo Electoral), where it had to be authorized within a time frame of 3 months.
The committee pro party WINAQ has to gather 17 thousand affiliates in two years to become a political party. Amilcar Pop stated in October 2008, that they have already approximately 32 thousand affiliates.
On the provisional board of directors of this new party is Rigoberta Menchu, General Secretary of the Party, President, Otilia Lux, a congress woman, sub-secretary, Amilcar Pop, President of the Mayan Association of Lawyers is the other sub- secretary of the board.
This is one of the most important steps ever achieved by a Mayan political leader in Guatemala. It is also a sign that times have changed in Guatemala.
Rigoberta Menchu is a symbol of Mayan resistance to the oppressive military regimes of Guatemala during the cold war. She is as controversial among Ladinos as she is among Mayans.
The creation of an indigenous political party is a step in the direction of a more inclusive democratic process in Guatemala.
Picture: La Hora
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Surprised...
Controversies about her testimony
More than a decade after the publication of I, Rigoberta Menchú, anthropologist David Stoll carried out an investigation of Menchú's story, researching government documents, reports, and land claims (many filed by Menchú's own family), and interviewing former neighbors, locals, friends, enemies, and others for his 1999 book Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans. He did not interview Menchú herself, however. Stoll confirmed that Menchú grew up in a Mayan peasant village which was visited by Marxist guerrillas and then attacked by the Guatemalan army. However, Stoll claimed that Menchú changed some elements of her life, family and village to meet the publicity needs of the guerrilla movement, which she joined as a political cadre after her parents were assassinated.
In the book, Menchú maintained that her family was actively involved in fighting against their subjugation by wealthy Guatemalans of European descent and the Guatemalan government. She also claimed that her father, Vicente Menchú, had founded the peasant movement known as the Committee for Campesino Unity. Instead, Stoll and New York Times journalist Larry Rohter found that Vicente Menchú, while poor, was relatively prosperous by local Mayan standards. As leader of his community, he won a 27.53 km² land grant from the Guatemalan government. Unfortunately, his success led to a long-running dispute with his wife's relatives, in the Tum family, who claimed some of the same land. During the late 1970s, when Vicente Menchú's daughter claimed that he was an underground radical political organizer, he was at the same time home in his village of Chimel working with U.S. Peace Corps volunteers.
In her 1982 life story, Menchú claimed that she and her family had been forced to work as peons on a distant coastal plantation for eight months of the year, as millions of other impoverished Mayan farmworkers continue to do every year. According to neighbors, however, the family was sufficiently well-off to avoid this fate. Menchú also claimed that her father refused to allow her to attend school, on the grounds that it would turn her into a non-indigenous "ladino" who would forget her Mayan roots, but in reality, Catholic nuns supported her in a succession of private boarding schools until she reached the 8th grade.
Stoll claims that Menchú's account of watching her younger brother Nicolas die of malnutrition was false, as Stoll located a living brother of hers named Nicolas. Menchú has responded that she was referring to another brother also named Nicolas (giving several children the same name is a common practice among rural Mayans in Guatemala). When interviewed by Rohter, the surviving Nicolas affirmed that two brothers had died of malnutrition but remembered the name of only one of them, Felipe.[7] relativity theory or
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